A Master From Germany

By Richard Rorty

Published: May 3, 1998

MARTIN HEIDEGGER

Between Good and Evil.

By Rudiger Safranski.

Translated by Ewald Osers.

474 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press. $35.

MANY people who learn that Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) lied over and over again about his Nazism, and that he did his best to ignore the murder of the European Jews, conclude that his writings can be neglected. For those who care about philosophy, however, things are not that simple.

Heidegger was a resentful, ungenerous, disloyal and deceitful man. But he somehow managed to write books that are as powerful and as original as Spinoza's or Hegel's. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas all cut their teeth on those books. You cannot read most of the important philosophers of recent times without taking Heidegger's thought into account.

Rudiger Safranski's evenhanded study, ''Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil'' (in a capable translation by Ewald Osers), is equally successful at illustrating its subject's pettiness and at displaying the vast power of his imagination. It is the first comprehensive biography of the man, and supersedes both Victor Farias's ''Heidegger and Nazism'' and Hugo Ott's ''Martin Heidegger: A Political Life.'' It reports many facts that these books did not, and it offers a detailed account of Heidegger's intellectual development -- relating his twists and turns, with great skill and remarkable concision, to German intellectual and political life in the first half of this century.

Safranski, the author of ''Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy,'' never steps back and pronounces judgment on Heidegger, but something can be inferred from the German title of his book: ''Ein Meister aus Deutschland'' (''A Master From Germany''). Heidegger was, undeniably, a master, and was very German indeed. But Safranski's spine-chilling allusion is to Paul Celan's best-known poem, ''Death Fugue.'' In Michael Hamburger's translation, its last lines are:

death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue

he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air

he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamith.

No one familiar with Heidegger's work can read Celan's poem without recalling Heidegger's famous dictum: ''Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.'' Nobody who makes this association can reread the poem without having the images of Hitler and Heidegger -- two men who played with serpents and daydreamed -- blend into each other. Heidegger's books will be read for centuries to come, but the smell of smoke from the crematories -- the ''grave in the air'' -- will linger on their pages.

Heidegger is the antithesis of the sort of philosopher (John Stuart Mill, William James, Isaiah Berlin) who assumes that nothing ultimately matters except human happiness. For him, human suffering is irrelevant: philosophy is far above such banalities. He saw the history of the West not in terms of increasing freedom or of decreasing misery, but as a poem. ''Being's poem,'' he once wrote, ''just begun, is man.''

For Heidegger, history is a sequence of ''words of Being'' -- the words of the great philosophers who gave successive historical epochs their self-image, and thereby built successive ''houses of Being.'' The history of the West, which Heidegger also called the history of Being, is a narrative of the changes in human beings' image of themselves, their sense of what ultimately matters. The philosopher's task, he said, is to ''preserve the force of the most elementary words'' -- to prevent the words of the great, houses-of-Being-building thinkers of the past from being banalized.

Heidegger wobbled back and forth between a self-effacing conception of the philosopher as the interpreter of an already written poem and an egomaniacal belief in the world-historical importance of his own work. In the latter mood, he hoped that he himself would complete the stanza of Being's poem that Plato had begun -- that he would utter a word that would come, as Arendt said both Plato's and Heidegger's did, ''from the primordial.'' When Hitler came along, the prophetic mood took over.

As Safranski tells us, Heidegger, who was born in Messkirch, in southern Germany, the son of a sexton, started out as a reactionary Roman Catholic, but after World War I he broke with the church. He then found a way to package Nietzsche and Tolstoy, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky into an academically respectable philosophical system. He reshaped what had been thought of as merely literary matter into a doctrine of the nature of human life. His ''Being and Time'' changed the course of European philosophy by breaking down barriers between genres, barriers no one else had been able to surmount.

That book, with its Nietzschean call to authenticity, resolution and decisiveness, was an instant success. This success encouraged the egomania that let Heidegger imagine that he and Hitler could work together to transform Germany. Heidegger was oblivious of the torment of his Jewish friends and colleagues, but after a year of hectic propagandizing and organizing, he did notice that the Nazi higher-ups were not paying much attention to him. This sufficed to show him that he had overestimated National Socialism.

So he retreated to his mountain cabin and, as Safranski nicely says, traded decisiveness for imperturbability. After World War II, he explained, imaginatively albeit monomaniacally, that Americanization, modern technology, the trivialization of life and the utter forgetfulness of Being (four names, he thought, for the same phenomenon) were irreversible. His last works are lyrics of resignation -- often very beautiful lyrics, though soiled by the events that led Heidegger to write them.

Safranski, appropriately, devotes three-quarters of his book to Heidegger's writings and only one-quarter to the events of his life. He entwines the two in a narrative that will engross those already familiar with Heidegger, but will be intelligible to those who are not. If you should decide that you ought, despite everything, to read Heidegger's books, this biography will give you a good running start.

Drawing

Richard Rorty has recently published two books, ''Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America'' and a collection of philosophical articles titled ''Truth and Progress.''